Renato Redentor Constantino

Hiroshima Memories: The Struggle Against Forgeting

Renato Redentor Constantino — 2005-08-06T18:08:26Z

Hiroshima, Japan — The day has grown dark and so has the river but the sky has remained luminous and clear.

Cyclists zip intermittently past empty benches and pedestrians walking along the bank of the gently flowing Motoyasu river. A few meters away, a heavy tram rumbles across the steel bridge, past the room-less windows and windowless rooms of the Genbaku Dome-mae. The Atom Bomb Dome. A skeletal reminder of what has been and what may yet be.

A man with a camera has already circled the Dome thrice, kneeling, twisting his body, crouching, constantly snapping pictures yet never seeming to find the right angle. Who knows if there really is one?

The Atom Bomb Dome is the ruins of the former Hiroshima Prefect Industrial Promotion Hall. At 8:15 in the morning of August 6, 1945 a weapon of mass death was detonated in the air 600 meters right above the hall which reduced to ashes nearly all the buildings within two kilometers of the bomb's hypocenter and which eventually claimed around 200,000 lives. Hiroshima's population at the time of the atomic bombing was approximately 350,000.

"In order to have this tragic fact known to succeeding generations and to make it a lesson for humankind," prayed the memorial plaque installed at the Atom Bomb Dome on August 6, 1967, the "ruins shall be preserved forever."

Forever may be too brief a reminder. (...)

- / ZNet

Chronicles of Kyoto

Renato Redentor Constantino — 2005-03-03T02:03:00Z

The Japanese call it the capusoru hoteru; capsule hotel in English. A modern day lodge offering hives upon hives of rooms in stacks of twos, each framed by a sickly, square yellow glow and uniformly measuring three feet and a half in height, three feet wide and the length of an average Asian man.

The capsule hotel is a new icon of Japanese urban living, one created mainly for transient men who missed the last train bound for wherever and Neverwhere. Crawling inside for the first time can make one wonder whether the sensation of lying down in such a room is similar to the sweet serenity proffered by the morgue suite. (...)

- / ZNet

As we grieve

Renato Redentor Constantino — 2005-01-13T03:24:00Z

There is no space wider than that of grief, wrote the poet Pablo Neruda. "There is no universe like that which bleeds." On the planet of sorrow, "there is no street, no one has a door. The sand opens up only to a tremor. And the whole sea opens the whole of silence."

Poetry, said Italo Calvino, is the art of putting the ocean into a glass. (...)

- / TomDispatch

Nothing New in the World

Renato Redentor Constantino — 2004-09-12T03:59:00Z

"Memory says, 'I did that,'" Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote. "Pride replies, 'I could not have done that.' Eventually, memory yields."

Three years ago in America, on September 11, airplanes fell from the sky and thousands died. Countless numbers mourned the mass murder. Countless mourn still. On the same day 31 years ago, the sky fell in Chile when the democratically-elected Allende government was overthrown in a bloody coup staged by the American government. Who mourns the Chilean sky?

Remembering is a political act, wrote Boston Globe columnist James Carroll. "Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny."

In 1953, the United States engineered a coup in Iran which ousted the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh — an Iranian colossus who happened to live in a frail old man's body. (...)

- / TomDispatch

The Nineteenth of July

Renato Redentor Constantino — 2004-07-23T03:36:23Z

Op-Ed

The memories of another day — missing ruminations of generations. Will we ever remember? Will we ever learn? Who's to say?

Elvis Presley's first single was released on this day in 1954. It was "That's all right" with "Blue Moon Kentucky." The single was a minor hit and one and a half years later, Presley would explode to superstardom with "Heartbreak Hotel."

One and a half years later, on July 19, 1957, the first rocket with a nuclear warhead is launched at Yucca Flat, Nevada. That's all right, said the smiling rocket engineers. What heartbreak.

Five Massachusetts women were hanged on July 19, 1692 — for witchcraft. Hundreds of years later, on July 19, 1948, a similar witch-hunt opens its first inquiry at the University of Washington in Seattle under the banner of the Un-American Activities Committee chaired by Rep. Albert Canwell. The purpose of the Canwell Committee: to weed-out witches — local Communist subversives — and to hang their souls. (...)

God Bless America

Renato Redentor Constantino — 2004-06-22T04:00:00Z

Coincidence, pattern, and memory. Tricky things these three.

One ghastly day in May, at close to three in the morning, a US helicopter fires its missiles at the village of Mukaradeeb in western Iraq. "Coalition forces came under hostile fire and close air support was provided," the Pentagon explains later. The target was "a suspected foreign fighter safe house," the deputy director of U.S. military operations in Iraq, Gen. Mark Kimmitt, adds. (...)

With Nature There Are No Special Effects

Renato Redentor Constantino — 2004-06-04T18:18:27Z

From the Asian perspective, today is the day after tomorrow. Climate change is "the great amplifier," making already-significant problems in fresh water, public health and agriculture disastrous. When a Greenpeace activist can quote stodgy re-insurance companies' assessments on the economic costs of climate change, it's time to wake up and make some changes.

(Scroll halfway through the TomDispatch commentary to get to the article.)